Wiki News Live
Today:
The President’s Police State
NEWS | 12 August 2025
For years, prominent voices on the right argued that Democrats were enacting a police state. “This is liberation day in D.C.,” Trump said. His response is not just to flex power but to treat the District of Columbia as the president’s personal fiefdom. But what this PR stunt could also do is create precedent for Trump to send armed forces out into American streets whenever he declares a spurious state of emergency. He deployed the D.C. National Guard during protests after the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020.

Top Stories:
Donald Trump Doesn’t Really Care About Crime
NEWS | 12 August 2025
Donald Trump is famously reluctant to commit troops abroad but salivates at the prospect of using them against Americans at home. Trump claims that he is acting to quell a spike in violent crime. (One of the first acts of his second term was a blanket pardon of violent criminals convicted of assaulting police officers on January 6, 2021. Even by this skewed definition of crime, however, Trump’s D.C. takeover makes little sense. “Trump has the opportunity to do a Bukele-style crackdown on DC crime,” Chris Rufo, a conservative activist who has influenced the administration, wrote on X.

World:
Trump’s Farcical D.C. Crackdown
NEWS | 12 August 2025
He’s sending in the troops because he can—because D.C., as a federal enclave with few protections from presidential overreach, makes for a uniquely soft target. “Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control,” he wrote on Truth Social. (Why, for that matter, did he refuse for hours to deploy the National Guard on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob assaulted law-enforcement officers?) So far, however, the surge in law enforcement—which began a few days ago, before this morning’s announcement—appears mostly farcical. After the 2020 National Guard deployment to D.C., congressional Democrats briefly rallied around the idea of finally granting the District statehood.

Current Events:
Extreme Home Makeover: White House Edition
NEWS | 12 August 2025
The limousine pulls up at the White House. Donald Trump: I’m so glad you came to give us this makeover, J.D.! Exterior shot of the White HouseNarrator: This old building, called the “White House,” needs work! I want the White House to be disorienting for visitors, like Vegas. Outside the White House, the National Guard starts to assemble.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 12 August 2025
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News Flash:
The Clean-Energy Equation No One Can Solve Yet
NEWS | 12 August 2025
Dubbed the “peak oil” theory, the concept held sway for decades as U.S. production of crude topped out in 1970, then declined. But clean-energy technologies are advancing rapidly enough that trying to imagine the industry’s needs 75 years from now is a very theoretical exercise. Just as fears of peak oil were eventually mooted by technology, fears of peak mineral very well could be too. In this still-early stage of the world’s clean-energy boom, though, mineral needs are shifting quickly and opening up opportunities for substitutes. Their goal, they wrote, was to “encourage systemic thinking in designing sustainable energy transitions.”Substitution is just part of that equation.

Latest:
Israel and Gaza, Held Hostage by Fundamentalism
NEWS | 12 August 2025
In recent months, I have written about the war in Gaza in The Atlantic and spoken about it in The Observer, but I circled the subject. The rape, murder, and abduction of Israelis at the Nova music festival and elsewhere in southern Israel were evil. We know Hamas is using starvation as a weapon in the war, but now so too is Israel, and I feel revulsion for that moral failure. The government of Israel is not the nation of Israel, but the government of Israel, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today, deserves our categorical and unequivocal condemnation. Is what was once an oasis of innovation and freethinking now in hock to a fundamentalism as blunt as a machete?

Breaking:
Americans Are All In on Cow-Based Wellness
NEWS | 12 August 2025
Demand for raw milk has grown, despite numerous cases of illness and warnings from public-health officials that drinking it can be fatal. In certain circles, raw cow organs—heart, liver, kidney—are prized superfoods. Other brands invoke nature through the prehistoric, with names such as Primal Harvest, Primal Kitchen, Primal FX, Primal Being, and Primal Queen. The carnivore and tradwife movements embody a similar message, promoting the consumption of raw cow organs and making butter from scratch. Many cow-based wellness products bear the label “grass-fed,” which suggests cows that were raised on pastures rather than feedlots.

Trending:
A Tech Rule That Will ‘Future-Proof’ Your Kids
NEWS | 12 August 2025
The psychologist Lisa Damour, who specializes in adolescent development, has told parents that if they implement only one tech rule, this should be it. It seemed like a holy grail—the rule to follow if you can follow only one rule. For years, experts, including those at the American Academy of Pediatrics, have urged parents to wrestle kids’ screens out of their room in the evening. The “Wait Until 8th” pledge is great—until phones come and risk tanking kids’ sleep and judgment just as they’re starting high school. And if kids don’t have experience using tech, they won’t have any opportunities to practice using it responsibly.

This Just In:
A Cheat Code for Parents Isn’t Working Anymore
NEWS | 12 August 2025
Before the streaming boom, parents could depend on a handful of publicly funded or dedicated networks for well-curated, enriching children’s programming. But as newer media platforms have become more prevalent, kids’ television has become more sprawling—and more difficult for families to navigate. Streamers such as Netflix now offer kids’ programming, with their own siloed-off sections and parental controls; YouTube, too, is packed with content creators making children’s videos. “Essentially,” Chanda told me, “you only are as valuable as your thumbnail.”As such, children’s television has become a diffuse field. (Not all content labeled this way ends up on YouTube Kids.

Today:
How Not to Fix American Democracy
NEWS | 12 August 2025
This is the thesis of The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, a new book by Osita Nwanevu, a writer for The New Republic and The Guardian. He says at the outset that he’s “dog-tired, already, of the habits of mind that shape American political journalism” and jaded by all the talk about threats to “our democracy” from pundits who don’t know or care what it really is. Adrienne LaFrance: A ticking clock on American freedomIn The Right of the People, Donald Trump is barely a minor character. For Nwanevu, democracy is ultimately about the distribution of power. They also have to diagnose and fix what’s wrong with an American system that most Americans think has failed them.

Top Stories:
No One in the White House Knows How to Stop Ebola
NEWS | 12 August 2025
As of last month, there is no one left in the White House whose sole job is to keep the nation safe from biological threats. Without a leader from the NSC embedded in the White House and ready to coordinate other agencies, more people—including Americans—will get sick and die. In early February 2021, an ominous email came to the White House from federal health officials: reports of Ebola outbreaks in Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The White House was already managing the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic crisis. They also created the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy in the White House.

World:
The Elite-University Presidents Who Despise One Another
NEWS | 12 August 2025
The stated topic that day was the public’s decreasing trust in higher education. And they think that higher education needs new representation if it’s going to regain the country’s trust. Eisgruber’s position as AAU chair and Princeton’s stature among American universities make him a natural spokesperson. Republican representatives, meanwhile, had been telling university presidents that they wouldn’t give them a tax break to go on indoctrinating students. Polling shows that confidence in American higher education has cratered in recent years, especially among Republicans.

Current Events:
Canada Is Killing Itself
NEWS | 12 August 2025
“The most important thing,” one doctor told me, “is the networking.”Which is to say that it might have been any other convention in Canada. It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. This is how assisted death is typically approached in other countries, including Belgium and the Netherlands. But in Canada, the system largely developed around the MAID coordination centers assembled in the provinces, complete with 1-800 numbers for self-referrals. The original assumption was that euthanasia in Canada would follow roughly the same trajectory that euthanasia had followed in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 12 August 2025
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here